Oddbean new post about login | logout Come up with something better is the exact right response. Essentially at the moment there is a pretty stark choice between decentralization and performance / efficiency. You can get performance and efficiency by aggregating and thus centralizing data. That's Twitter. Or you can have the basic nostr model of data spread far and wide under no point sources of control with the trade-off that it's never going to have the efficiency of a monolithic database and the need to invent new optimizations that make it work acceptably well. The gossip / outbox model seems like the current best basic optimization that retains real decentralization (without which nostr is absolutely nothing interesting at all) and lets clients find stuff. Come up with something better.
The best what outbox model can achieve (if implemented extremely and exceptionally well, which requires huge amount of man-hours) — is to become a niche technology for “ultra censorship resistance guys” (which it will unlikely to become because there are hundreds of other things needed to become censorship resistant)
Gotta say I’m pretty blown away by this response. If the most simple and obvious arguments have no rebuttal, then we indeed desperately need to come up with something better. I assumed those pushing it had at least thought past level 0. The choice isn’t gossip model or one single database. Look around, what we have now is already much better than that.
Sorry I massively oversimplified because I think it's a big picture issue. Of course there is a lot of grey. But essentially there are currently three big picture models. There's one big database (which of course is not really one db, but again simplifying) aka Twitter, there's semi decentralized where independent servers federate aka mastodon, and there's fully decentralized like nostr currently is trying to be for the most part. I'm not trying to be dismissive or sarcastic. I've tried to come up with something better and I can't. But that doesn't mean someone else couldn't. Maybe you will. I hope you do.
I agree that without decentralization, nostr becomes uninteresting. So centralizing on the same big relays is not an option. The only alternative to outbox/inbox that I know of is blasting events everywhere, and that has the worse downside of massive resource usage and its scalability becomes more and more difficult the larger the network grows. I think the downsides of the outbox/inbox model aren't a big deal. They only arise on mobile if you have low battery and are trying to follow a god-awful number of people, or if you want privacy but for some inexplicable reason aren't operating over tor and so you are pissed that your IP address leaked to a server you didn't pre-approve of (even that can be solved with whitelisting).